simple java repl for mac

Question

I'm looking for a simple java REPL for OSX. For ruby there's irb, for javascript there's node, for python you can just type python and get a REPL. I assumed there would be something easy for Java. I googled around and came across this project: java-repl. I was shocked by how large it was, and then shocked again when I couldn't get it to run. Anyone have a better option?

Answer 1

I'd say one of the lightest Java REPLs is BeanShell (http://www.beanshell.org/). It's only ~150kB in size and you can run it simply with:

java -cp bsh-2.0b4.jar bsh.Interpreter

If you're after something even lighter you can give a try to REPL (http://www.scravy.de/blog/2012-02-27/a-read-eval-print-loop-for-java.htm). That's only ~14kB in size but very limited (featurewise)

JDK also comes with jrunscript but that's JavaScript REPL (although you could be able to change the engine to something else, like Java)